Upon first opening the case, we are presented with the accessories box and some eye-catching features. Arguably the most outstanding feature is the cable-management system. Black clips run along the edges of the motherboard for routing PSU and other types of cables. Though they are situated frustratingly close to the motherboard during installation, you can spin them or remove them as you so desire. Moving down to the bottom of the case, we see that they have added some vibration dampening foam and rubber feet to the PSU housing for vibration and noise control, another nice attention to detail.

Following the norm, CM has made this case entirely toolless. The expansion slots are very basic, similar to almost all cases available on the market today. To use the drive bays, simply lift up a clip and then drop it back down when the screw-holes are aligned, sliding the clip to lock it in position. If, for some odd reason, you love to use your screw-driver, Cooler Master chose to supply you with all the screws you could ever need. By installing the screws in the edges of the expansion bays, CM allows the user to carry their screws with them everywhere the case goes, and never have to deal with little plastic baggies.

Here you can see some of the fans and fan ports included in the CM690. There is a lot of room for expansion, but they did not skimp on the number of included fans. Each fan is rated at 21dBA (about whisper quiet), which should come in handy if each fan port is filled up. If you're very observant, you'll notice that the side panels have an extraordinary amount of alignment flaps. This is a very frustrating “feature.” The side panels are very thin, so they bend out of place easily, making it very difficult to remove or attach the side panel. This will be a huge hassle for any PC user that is often changing components.

Finally, the components are in the case and we can see how well these features really work. One of my favorite aspects of the case is the hard-drive system that is designed for good cable-management. Cables easily route behind the cage, staying out of the way of the airflow from the intake fan. One final note about the end result is that the bottom-mount PSU system requires longer cables. “ATX” power supplies are designed around standard ATX case layouts, and as such may not have enough slack to make good use of the cable-management system. You can see in the last picture that one of my cables had to cut directly across the case to reach my ceiling fans and CPU cooler.

Now that everything's all set, let's test some temperatures and wrap this up, shall we?